Dancing In the Rain!

I thought I would take a different route today with this posting. I have been thinking a lot about life lately. It probably has something to do with my age (53)! I was up at my daughter's home in Washington and I noticed a saying on her wall....

Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass....
It is about learning to dance in the rain!



Normally I would have just let it go as a nice quote with some good meaning. It went deeper than that. I call myself the History Man because I am intrigued with the connections to my own life and our present time as a world civilization. History has shaped us into who we are today. Any little deviation in time could have given us a different today, maybe better, maybe worse. Collectively people have worked together or fought with one another, to determine our path. However, there have been certain individuals that have had a dynamic effect on the outcome of civilization. Some of these individuals have been good for mankind while others have not. Since I have worked for FOOTNOTE.COM I have come to appreciate the effect that each of our lives have on others. Even if we are not one of these dynamic individuals we still play a great part in shaping what happens within our own sphere. When I first started in the job I now have, I wrote a poem for a Christmas letter to some of our clients. I built it around the word Footnote and found when I was done that my philosophy of life and individual importance had been expressed.



With all of these things in mind I want to now come back to "Dancing In the Rain". Life is full of ups and downs. Sometimes the clouds are so thick and the rain is coming down so hard that despair sets in. I once had a very wise man tell me that the difference between disappointment and discouragement is a very thin line. Disappointment causes us to act while discouragement finds us giving in to the darkness. How we deal with that line determines whether we are happy or depressed. No one enjoys depression. The purpose of life in my opinion is to experience joy. I don't think many would disagree with that. We have a conscious choice to make. Do we get up when the clouds converge on us and dance in the rain, or do we give up for a time and distance ourselves from living.

I do believe children have the answer. Everything to them is an adventure, or a miracle. They notice the small things like a mud puddle. I remember as I sit here how enthralled I was when I was a child with a big mud puddle. They almost seemed like lakes. Wading in up to my shins was a great adventure. Getting wet in the rain and then playing in it was a great joy. It was almost magical. It was my parents who had to tell me to come in out of the rain, probably because they didn't want me sick. As a child I didn't think about getting sick until it was driven into me. Until that time life in the rain was nothing but a great adventure. I am afraid that sometimes we mistake putting out the fire of life with wisdom. I will end by sharing a couple more pictures with you and a song by one of my favorites, Carol King.